Bob Scheer’s long interview with me, “Where is the Middle East Heading?” is available at ScheerPost. I’m providing an excerpt below, but be sure to head on over to his site for the entire interview and audio link, as well as the full transcript. I’m embedding the full YouTube video believe.
Excerpt from the Interview
Robert Scheer
So this is important for people to consider, because the Israel that I have in my memory is one that was easy for American liberal people and Jews and non-Jews to embrace, people on the progressive side of things, including what were then moderate Republicans and others, as basically a place of tolerance and where the notion of the Jewish people as a tolerant people came out of oppression came out of suffering antisemitism. And therefore the great, most of the great Jewish writers and cultural figures were advocates of tolerance, whether it was Hannah Arendt or Albert Einstein or many, many others, Leonard Bernstein, what have you. And something changed here, and it affects American politics, because right now, the Israel that you described is one that it’s easy for Trump to embrace, but a little more awkward for Democratic politicians to embrace, ever more so by the increase of violence connected with nationalism for Israel. And you saw that even when Netanyahu came to Congress, the people who sort of were not there, were mostly Democrats and the Republicans were quite happy with Netanyahu. Is this going forward, particularly as the violence and the charge of genocide, can be now more supportable as a description, where does this leave American politics?
Juan Cole
Yeah, well, it’s very clear that most members of the Democratic Party — and including American Jews in very large numbers — are disgusted with with Netanyahu policies, and the support for Israel has fallen dramatically among them, especially young people — and, again, including young American Jews. So yes, Israel had benefited from being a bipartisan commitment. Both Democrats and Republicans were committed to it. That’s changing now. It’s becoming a partisan football, and there are Democrats who are beginning to be highly critical of Israel — and the Progressive Caucus of about 60 members of Congress on the Democratic side, I think they all believe that Israel is committing a genocide, and are concerned about the degree to which the United States government is supporting these actions.
So, yes, I think it’s not a good development for the Israelis, and it’s not a good development for anybody, including Jewish Americans, some of whom, you know, are unfairly now being tagged as genocidaires, as supporting all of this, even though it’s not clear at all that most American Jews are on board with what Netanyahu is doing. The American Jewish establishment back in the ’90s wouldn’t meet with Likudniks. They wouldn’t meet with people from Netanyahu’s party. Ariel Sharon couldn’t get a hearing before he was Prime Minister back in the ’90s.
The organized Israel lobby of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, has shifted to the far right, along with Netanyahu, and some of the very wealthy members of the community are all on board — the Adelson’s with their casino money and so forth. But I would say that the average Jewish American in the street is not at all happy with this situation. You know, obviously the October 7 attacks were horrific, and I think everybody in America felt supportive of Israel at that moment. But the things that have happened in the aftermath have been unacceptable to most Americans, and I think most Jewish Americans, so that I think Kamala Harris’s diction about it — that “Israel has the right to defend itself, but it matters how” — is a very widespread sentiment.
And there are people who are much more vehement than that, of course. So yes, you’ve put your finger on an important issue. It’s also the case that Netanyahu is obviously attempting to draw the United States into another war in the Middle East with Iran this time. And were he to succeed, and were it to go badly — and I think inevitably, it would go badly — there’s danger of that feeding into antisemitism as well as “the Jews dragged us into this thing,” and so forth. So it’s an extremely explosive moment.
Robert Scheer
And you just made so much sense about it. And I thought about today, because thinking about Kamala Harris, first of all, she did give a significant speech in Selma, where she preceded her speech by talking about the situation in Gaza and West Bank in very human terms about the suffering and it had to be dealt with, and she clearly has a sensibility in that direction. On the other hand, she’s moved more hawkish and so forth and during the course of this campaign. But today, and I didn’t fully absorb the statement, but I gathered from what I read so far, she sort of singled out Iran as our biggest enemy. And for people who don’t understand anything of the history of Iran, if that’s our biggest enemy, it’s an enemy that US foreign policy created. Just going back to the overthrow of the last secular leader of Iran, which is now 75 years ago, or something Mohammed Mosaddegh and how we installed the Shah and created all these conditions and so forth. How should we think about Iran right now? And they’ve gone through some changes. They have sort of a more moderate elected leader now, but bring us up to date. And how is Israel going to fare? You say it won’t end well, but they think they’re going to have a swift victory and just get rid of the Islamic State, right?
Juan Cole
Well, they, you know, a lot of people told us we’d have a quick victory over Iraq, and we would the Middle East would turn glorious if only we got rid of Saddam Hussein. The United States has the most high tech and most capable military in the world, and certainly could defeat a conventional Iranian force. But Iran is three times geographically larger than Iraq, and two and a half times more populous than Iraq. And so if things didn’t go well for the United States in its eight and a half year occupation of Iraq, imagine how badly things would go in Iran. That’s a much bigger, more populous country, which is, frankly, also more technologically advanced than Iraq was, so the guerrilla resistance would be fierce and effective. Iran has, by now, a long history of opposing Western imperialism, and it’s been put in a very difficult position by Netanyahu’s aggressive actions. Iran supports the Palestinians and their demand for citizenship in a state. It seems to favor a one-state solution in which there are just Palestinians and Israelis would jointly elect a government. That’s the kind of thing that they say, which the Israelis view as a call for the liquidation of Israel, because it’s an ethno-nationalist state. If it’s not a Jewish state, then it’s not Israel. But the Iranians are not saying that the Jews should be killed or that anything should be liquidated. Some of them are antisemites, and do speak horribly about about the Jews of Israel, but the main figures of the government have had this one state solution sort of rhetoric. But they support the Palestinians. They have supported the Hezbollah, the Shiite party militia of southern Lebanon. And yes, I think that you have to see Iran and and Hezbollah as reactive to Israeli expansionism. The Israelis occupied 10% of Lebanese soil, southern Lebanon, for 18 years. And the Lebanese, wanted them right back out of their country. They didn’t want to be occupied. And the Shiites of southern Lebanon, who nobody ever heard of them in the wider world, before Israel occupied that area, threw up these resistance movements like Hezbollah. It was Israel that radicalized the Shiites of southern Lebanon.
Robert Scheer
This is an important point, if I could just stop you. Could you tell us a little bit about that history is this where Hezbollah comes from?
Juan Cole
Yeah, Hezbollah was formed in 1984 two years after the Israelis invaded southern Lebanon. The Lebanon is a multicultural country. It has Christians. It has Sunni Muslims. That has Shiite Muslims. It has Druze, which are an offshoot, ultimately, of the Shiites. It has Eastern Orthodox Christians. It used to have Jews and its constituent parts are very finely balanced in the national elections and institutions. But the Israelis in 1947 and ’48 expelled large numbers of Palestinians north to Lebanon and the Lebanese couldn’t accept them as immigrants. They couldn’t give them citizenship because they were mostly Sunni Muslims. And it would have given extra numbers to the Sunnis, it would have unbalanced the whole system. So the Palestinians in Lebanon have lived without citizenship, without property rights, without the right to work in refugee camps in squalid conditions ever since 1948, and I’ve spoken to some of them in camps, they all want to go back to their homes in what is now Israel, and they formed the Palestine Liberation Organization. They joined it in some numbers, and started striking at Israel in the ’70s, and the Israelis hit back at Lebanon. They didn’t just hit back at the Palestinians in Lebanon, but they hit back at Lebanon proper. And the Christians in Lebanon really minded that the Palestinians were using Lebanon as a base to hit Israel. And a civil war broke out in ’75 between the right-wing Christians and the Palestinians and their allies. And that war went on until 1989. And in the midst of the war, in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon with the hope of destroying the PLO, destroying the Palestine Liberation Organization and propping up the right-wing Christians and reshaping Lebanese politics, the candidates…
Robert Scheer
The right-wing Christians, as I recall, created a massacre of Palestinians.
Juan Cole
At Sabra and Shatila, the Israelis gave the task of guarding this Palestinian camp to the right-wing Christians, and the right wing Christians committed a massacre there. The Israelis have recently been bombing in that area, and people are fleeing Sabra and Shatila as we speak, bad memories are coming back up.
So, Hezbollah formed because of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, because of this invasion, and the Israelis just stayed. They stayed, and Hezbollah formed and began hitting them with guerrilla tactics. They would snipe at them. They would set off bombs. They would engage in suicide bombing, which they picked up from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and they succeeded in 2000 in forcing the Israelis back out. And the right wing in Israel has always minded that, that Ehud Barak, the then Prime Minister, gave up this territory in Lebanon and let Hezbollah push them out. That’s one of the reasons they’re determined now to destroy Hezbollah, to throw Lebanon, from their point of view, they have hopes of throwing it back into civil war, maybe enlisting some of the Lebanese to help destroy Hezbollah, and then putting in a government that they like. It’s 1982 all over again. 1982 was an enormous failure, and it produced more radicalization and more headaches in the long term for Israel. And it caused the Shiites in southern Lebanon to ally with Iran, which wasn’t, you know, many of them were not with Khomeini initially. So this will just be more trouble. This kind of “big think” of Netanyahu that he can just reshape the countries around him, militarily. It’s all going to end very badly.
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